Mourad explains that she was an “ultra-leftist” journalist in 1973, the year the CIA approached her. "We were very anti-American because of Vietnam, because of Cuba. Che Guevara was our hero."She was struggling to have her articles published, partly because editors complained that she didn’t present the American viewpoint.

"My English boyfriend, who I thought was a journalist, told me he could put me in touch with someone in the American embassy."Mourad agreed and they had lunch with a “gentleman, who was like an old uncle and was very nice”. The diplomat invited her to have coffee the next week, and they spoke some more.

As she would soon realise, that was exactly what was happening. The diplomat revealed he secretly worked for the CIA and asked her to join the agency. “While he was talking,” Mourad remembers, “I was imagining a fantastic article on how the CIA tried to recruit a left-wing journalist.”

She pretended to accept the offer, planning to go along with the process and then write a sensational story about it. “I thought this would impress my editors - I was ambitious, maybe reckless.”

A journalist friend warned Mourad that the idea was risky and that the CIA could take revenge. “I became frightened,” she recalls. “I worried they would think I tried to cheat them, so a week later I wrote to them saying I had reconsidered. That was maybe a mistake because it left a trace, but I had no courage to confront the man.”

One CIA memo quoted in the Sunday Times investigation records that “operational approval was cancelled in April 1979”, years later. Mourad says she finds it bewildering. "It could be a bureaucratic mistake, or maybe they didn’t want to admit they had failed in their attempt. “There was one week when I thought I could cheat the CIA.”